How To Find Your Wow Wow by Riham Adly

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How To Find Your Wow Wow
 
The House with Ants.

That night it was just me and the living-room couch, watching a living, dark puddle-- where one wall met another-- thinning out into a wobbly not-so-straight line near the window. The puddle was really ants, flying ants, with their scouts retracing a trail.
Dad and my brand new step-mom were doing some serious noise in mum’s bed.
Our flat was like a sardine box with a window that looked out on another window that also happened to look out on another window and so forth. It was like watching an image repeat itself in those many mirrors, each one a bit distorted than the one before, till you’ve reached the monster at the end of the line, the root of it all.
I imagined having a daughter named Hannah, holding a camera.
“Smile mama, it’s the end of the world.”
I’d shy away from the flash. One shutter-click, two shutter-clicks, three shutter-clicks, and then poof! She’s a blurry photo, her feathery touch a fading dream.
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When I looked outside the window into another window, I saw the wobbly-not-so-straight line spreading out like the sea.


The Neighbors or What’s Left of Them

Mrs. Macintosh's cracked heart, in its kind shade of red, was all the flying army’s left of her. It had been multi-chambered as all hearts are, but with enough room to have housed anyone who cared.

Mrs. Macintosh's window overlooked Mr. Fox’s, the engineer and data analyst. I liked Mr. Fox.  The wobbly raid spared his brain with all its convoluted alleys and intersections that once led to roads of success. Mr. Fox had had a charming lisp and an egg-shell quality about him, but at the end of the day his brain resembled a walnut. I craved pecans and cinnamon rolls. I wanted a latte.

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Love Lattes

I left for the Café Denim down the street. I wanted to know where all the love went. Was it nicely snug somewhere in someone’s back pocket like a crisp ten dollar note?

I saw the twinkle dance in my barista’s caramel eyes. I wanted to touch his sugary brown arms, let them warm me as I forced a tingly sprinkle of syrupy yearning. I wanted him to whisper in my ears and say: You’re one mad love, dove.

The flying sea swept through the cafe, its hungry waves consuming my barista, only sparing my sweet-toothed fantasies.

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Perhaps “The End”?

Back home, the police and the forensic specialists asked me to identify the messy pile of limbs on mama’s bed.

I cautiously put on a pair of sterile, mint-green gloves and started at the top, like I do when examining ripe veggies in the market. I picked a couple of my father’s kidney stones; they sparkled like clear quartz under the neon led lights. His penis, looked like a shriveled prune that might have once been an eel.  And oh my, yes! I found it too, my brand-new step-mom’s flirty vagina, could have made one hell of a fine purse.

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Finding my Wow Wow.

I covered my face with my hand and wondered why little Hannah left. Why silence the shutter-click? But she was there, a beautiful monster, a fluttering queen in delicate sea-black.

“All I ever wanted was a latte.” I told her, my face still covering my hands.

The little one shook her head and gave me a “you-know-better” look.

“Go find your Wow Wow.” She had said.

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​*Listen to Riham's audio version of this story here.

Riham Adly’s flash fiction appeared in Bending Genres, Connotation Press, Spelk, The Cabinet of Heed, and Vestal Review, Odd magazine, Sonic Boon, Carpe Art, and The Ekphrastic Review among others. She recently made it to the short-list of the Arab-Lit Translation Prize. She lives with her family in Gizah, Egypt.
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